Science Fiction-A Memory

Science Fiction-A Memory

Doesn't Cal know the whole thing 
smells--smells to high heaven--
sitting there without a seatbelt
the lone passenger in a DC-9
converted for space travel?
No captain, no co-captain,
just a flashing atom on the dashboard
and the blip-blip-blip of the oscilloscope . . . .

Even when he touches down
he still doesn't get it--
transported to a faraway world
that looks a lot like Arizona
with exciting new techniques
to abolish poverty, hunger, war--
Though Cal should know
something is wrong with
the equations filling up the blackboard
and that the female in the white coat
with the hairdo and no ankles
has more on her mind than interplanetary physics.

No, secretly the high council insists
that Plan A must continue
and even the music of Mozart
cannot redeem these Plato-quoting bubble-heads 
with their larger cranial capacity
and triangle-shaped television--
They know what we know--
that Cal will never return to
Sunny California whence he came
But must remain forever in Arizona,
a lab-rat performing parlor tricks
for his evolutionary betters,
a walking sperm-bank for a slave race.
As the camera pans to the bulging
forehead of the High Leader
we know we're all done for--
Him, her, you, me us,
hunched over buckets of popcorn
in the dim limbo of the Aztec theater,
circa nineteenhundredandfiftyseven
greasy-fingered, hormonal, pubescent,
two rows back from the couple
going at it like lemurs,
That's it--exactly--our future--
and there ain't a damned thing
Any of us can do about it.